Audio at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jsua0m6GreY MICHAEL PARENTI - Conspiracy & Class Power - Berkeley, CA2 April 1993Michael Parenti is one of this country's foremost independent political analysts. He has taught at major colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of numerous books including Democracy for the Few, Power and the Powerless, The Face of Imperialism and The Assassination of Julius Caesar.I want to talk about the relationship of conspiracy to the larger political, economic context of the system. I want to start off by talking about that political, economic system. And I think it can be approached in three basic ways. First, you can look at the system as a conservative celebration. How wonderful our free-market society is, and how much more wonderful it would be if it were not for meddlesome government regulations and the demands of undeserving low-income groups that feed out of the public trough. That’s the conservative celebration.

The second approach is a liberal complaint about how some of our priorities are all wrong, how there are serious problems that represent aberrant departures from what is otherwise a basically good system.​ And then the third approach you might call a radical analysis.Thatseesecologicalcrisesandmilitary interventionsandthenationalsecuritystateand homelessness and poverty and an inequitable tax system andundemocraticsocialinstitutions,suchasthe corporate-owned media, not as aberrant outcomes of a basically rational system but as rational outcomes of a system whose central goal is the accumulation of wealth and power for a privileged class. Bertell Ollman is right that these things must all be looked at dialectically; that is, they must be looked at as part of a context of power and interest that is systemic.You could look at race, you could look at gender, and you could look at class itself undialectically, just look at it as an income bracket or whatever else. But what I’m talking about today is not class, but class power, the class power system, which is something more and something else.If you take that third perspective of a radical analysis, if you move from a conservative celebration or a liberal complaint to a radical analysis, you cross an invisible line, and you will be labeled in mainstream circles as a conspiracy theorist or a Marxist, or even a paranoiacFor some, conspiracy is by definition ridiculous and nonexistent. But, in fact, brothers and sisters, conspiracy is a very real thing. In fact, it’s a concept in law. People could go to jail for it. Conspiracy means “planning or acting together in secret, especially for an unlawful or harmful purpose, often with the use of illegal means.” It’s come to mean, in fact, any machination, plot, or concerted deception. The state’s major mode of operation is systemic and legalized rather than conspiratorial.Neverarguethatthestatemaintainsitself conspiratorially. No ruling interest could last long if it tried to control an entire society through the manipulations of secret cabals. At the same time, no ruling class could survive if it wasn’t attentive to its own interests, consciously trying to anticipate, control, or initiate events at home and abroad, both overtly and secretly. It’s hard to imagine a modern state in which there would be no conspiracies, no plans, no machinations, deceptions, or secrecies within the circles of power.

In the U.S., there have been conspiracies aplenty. I’ll list a bunch of them. These are all now a matter of public record in recent decades.The deliberately fabricated Tonkin Gulf incident, which served as an excuse for escalating the Vietnam War. You mean the president deliberately lied to the people to mislead the American people, and you’re saying he had this cold conspiracy to get them all worked up for something that never happened? Yes. We now know, yes. The Pentagon Papers are out. Yes, it was a total fabrication and a lie.Operation Phoenix, which no one has heard about, in which U.S. forces set up assassination squads that murdered thousands, tens of thousands of dissidents in Vietnam—secretly organized, illegal, immoral, unpublicized.The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, an illegal, secret, unlawful act followed by another conspiracy. The second one was the one that brought Nixon down—the Watergate cover-up.The FBI COINTELPRO,involvingdirty tricks, infiltration, and harassment of left dissident groups. I remember reading about it in The New York Times when the stories finally broke, the Church committee and all that. The august New York Times said, “For years left groups have been saying that the FBI has been harassing them, and we thought it was paranoia. Now it seems to turn out that there might be some truth in it.” Welcome to reality, New York Times. Every so often the Times hits right on reality like that. And it’s worth mentioning because it’s so rare.Iran-Contra, in which executive leaders conspired to circumvent the law, secretly, illegally selling arms to Iran in exchange for funds that were then used in covert actions against Nicaragua. A conspiracy about which the joint Congressional committee investigating Iran-Contra said, “We will probably never get at the bottom of this immense conspiracy.” That’s what they said. It wasn’t some conspiracy theorist; it was these people there. “We will never get at the bottom of this.” Certainly not the way you guys are investigating it, you would never get at the bottom of it.The function of the investigation is to uncover some stuff to let you know that the system is self-rectifying and self-cleansing, but not to uncover too much so as to destabilize the state itself. You heard guys on the committee saying, “We need a successful presidency. We must be careful what we’re doing,” and all that.​ The CIA drugs-for-guns trade in Central America. Covert CIA-sponsored terrorist wars in a dozen countries. The BCCI scandal, involving what some called the most crooked bank in the world. In 1990, the motherlode of all conspiracies, the savings and loan conspiracy, which the BushJustice Departmentitself called “a thousand conspiracies of bribe, theft, and fraud,” “a thousand conspiracies.” They said, We don’t have enough agents to investigate it. Sure, because all the agents are checking out events like this one. They’re too busy keeping tabs on people who are raising medical funds for El Salvador to go look at the savings and loan conspiracy, which is ripping off literally billions of dollars from the American taxpayer. The greatest financial crime in the history of humanity, savings and loan. You’ve been living it, and we are going to pay for it, so we might as well know about it.Conspiracies, I maintain, are carried out regularly by the national security state. What’s the national security state? It’s the White House Executive Office, it’s elements within the State Department and the Pentagon, it’s the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it’s the National Security Council, the National Security Agency, and the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The national security state is involved in secretly planned operations around the globe. It resortstolow-intensitywarfare,specialforces, undercover agents, surveillanceand infiltration and destruction of dissident groups, the bribing of state leaders, unlawful break-ins, the training of death squads and torturers, political assassination, counterinsurgency suppressionandterroristmilitaryforcesagainst revolutionary governments, as in Angola, Mozambique and Nicaragua.Our rulers themselves explicitly call for conspiratorial activities. They publicly admit it. Except they don’t call themconspiracies.Theycallthemcovertaction, clandestine operations, special operations, and national security. If for some reason you don’t want to call these undertakings conspiracies, don’t call them conspiracies. Give them another name. Call them peekaboo operations, surprise initiatives, call them whatever you want. But recognize them for what they are—willfully planned 2 actions whose real intentions are almost always denied. If they’re not conspiring, why all the secrecy?The existence of the national security state also demonstrates that along with issue politics we have class rule. In academic political science and in our news media, issue politics are either ignored or they’re looked at in a kind of vacuum. You can get issue politics, but it’s in a vacuum. This issue comes up, that issue comes up, that issue. Nothing is linked to anything else. Some political scientists I know—and I can name two very prominent ones right here at Berkeley have studied the American presidency for 30 years and written books on the subject and never mentioned capitalism and corporate interests. I remember turning to one, Aaron Wildavsky—we were on a panel together—and I said, “How could you write about the American presidency for 30 years and never once mention capitalism?” And he looked at me blankly. It turned out to be a rhetorical question.

To be sure, class interests permeate issue politics: tax policies, subsidies to corporate investments,corporate plunder of public lands, any number of issues. But issue politics do not encompass the totality of a class system. Class rule is notachievedsolelyby pressure-group politics, byinterest-grouppolitics. Classruleis not achieved solely by big campaign donations, lobbyists, and other manifestations of interest-group politics. Interest- group politics operates within a systemic totality of power and class interest. It operates within the dynamics of a capitalist state system, which, over and above the desires of any individual elites, imposes its own necessities.These systemic imperatives are things that must be taken care of if the system is to be maintained. If value is to be extracted from the labor of the many to go into the pockets of the few, this system has to be maintained. The conditions of hegemony must constantly be refortified. That’s something that no one IBM or ITT or General Motors could do for itself. So there has to be central financing and subsidizing. There has to be regulating and cushioning competition. There has to be a lot of new research and development that must be carried out at public cost with the benefits of it then privatized and handed over to corporations. There has to be transfer of public-domain resources into private corporate hands for their exploitation and profit.

From the public realm the riches go to the private realm, and then from the private realm you absorb the diseconomies, the poverties from the private sector, into the public realm. The diseconomies are picked up by the public. The pollution, the toxic waste dumps, all these things, we then have to pay for them. The homeless, the helpless, whatever else, those are things we have to pay for.That system also has to do something else: It has to act as the agent of class control. It has to mobilize repressive forces at home and abroad, it has to limit and suppress dissent, it has to control information and manipulate opinion. This is the essence of the state. That’s what the state is about, is to act as an overarching, conscious agent for maintaining the entire system, doing what no private interest group can do to buttress class hegemony. To put it simply, the function of the capitalist state is to sustain the capitalist order. And it must consciously be doing that.

For those who would deny conscious intent, we would ask, What is the function of the state? It pushes for privatization. One of the things it’s very active doing is pushing for privatization here at home and everywhere else. In Russia, too, you see it in the papers, what are called “reforms,” “the reformers.” The media keep talking about “the reformers.” Boris “Buy-Me-a-Drink” Yeltsin has reforms. What are the reforms about? The reforms are to privatize, to open up the vast riches and resources of Russia and hand them over to private foreign corporations for exploitation and big, quick profits. That’s what the reforms are. It is to push forth the system of capitalism.If the choice is between democracy without capitalism and capitalism without democracy, our leaders don’t want it. If it’s capitalism without democracy, that’s much preferred. Ideally what they want is capitalism with the window dressing of democracy. But democracy is a very dispensable component of that whole thing. Now what the media, of course, is doing is associating market economy with democracy. They keep putting the two together.

In sustaining capitalism, the state has a monopoly on the legitimate legal use of force and violence. In mobilizing that force and violence, the state has another extraordinary resource, which is control of the public treasury. That is, through a process of coercive, non- voluntary taxation, they extract from the public moneys which are then used to carry out these services. Some other things are also done: build roads and schools, those kinds of things. But generally that’s what the federal government is doing. The corporate class is not really willing to pay the enormous costs of protecting their interests. They couldn’t do it. Instead, through the taxing power of the state, they get the public to do it for them.You’re likely to be called, derisively, a conspiracy theorist not only if you believe that ruling-class leaders sometimes use conspiratorial methods but if you believe there’s even such a thing as a ruling class that uses the power and wealth of the state to buttress its overall class hegemony, or even if you think there is such a thing as consciously organized wealth. In other words, there is not only a denial that ruling interests act conspiratorially; there is a denial of the existence of ruling interests. That’s the pluralistic view, that we’re all in this. There is a very fluid system of various interest groups, and there is an interchange, interplay—you, me, David Rockefeller all down here kind of tugging and pulling for our different interests and expressing them, and each of us maybe getting a part but not getting all of what we want.Who is this corporate class, this superrich plutocracy, this oligarchy that you keep talking about, Parenti? Who 3 are these guys? It’s no mystery. I’m talking about the top 400 families. They’re listed in Forbes, the Social Register, almost a third of the descendants of whom are linked by blood or marriage to the Rockefeller, DuPont, Mellon, and Morgan dynasties. I’m talking about the superrich 1%, less than 1% of the population of this country that owns 70% of the nation’s wealth. I’m talking about the top 800,000 individuals over the age of 16 who have more wealth and income than the other 184 million individuals combined over the age of 16. The economist Paul Samuelson 30 years ago gave a very vivid image. It still holds. He says, If you want to look at the income distribution in this country, if you wanted to build an income pyramid, imagine taking children’s blocks. Each block is $1,000, and you pile them up. The highest income in this country would be vastly higher than the Eiffel Tower while almost all of us would be not more than a yard or a yard and a half off the ground. This gives you an idea of the spread and the distribution.Instead of conspiracy theory, what the apologists for power give us is what I call innocence theory. Innocence theory has several varieties.There’s somnambulist theory, that those in power just do things walking in their sleep, without a thought for their vast holdings and interests. David Rockefeller wakes up in the morning and says, “What am I going to do today? Am I going to look after my immense fortunes and investments? No, no. If I did that, I would only be playing into the hands of the conspiracy theorists. I won’t do that.” “I don’t like unions,” David Rockefeller says, “Oh, Morgans, Mellons, you don’t like unions either. Isn’t that a coincidence? I don’t like unions I guess because they sound like “onions,” and I don’t like onions. Along with somnambulist theory, we might explain away their hegemony as coincidence theory—that by sheer chance things just happen repeatedly and incidentally to benefit their interests without any conscious connivance by them. And it is most uncanny.A frequent mode of explanation is stupidity theory. Ronald Reagan, for years we heard that he was a moronic, ineffectual president. His administration was called “a reign of errors”—there was even a book by that title— even as he successfully put through his conservative agenda, even as he destroyed the progressive income tax system, even as he did all the other things that he did again and again and again—the judiciary, the budget, welfare spending, the military, everything. He did all these things, and we kept saying, “What a stupid dodo.” I felt like I was the only person in America going around saying, “He’s not stupid. He knows what he’s doing.” He would flub. He went to Uruguay and said, “It’s wonderful to be here in Bolivia.” He would make mistakes at his press conferences and elsewhere. But the guy had a class agenda. He was one of the few presidents who got into the White House and knew what the hell he wanted to do and set out to do it.

Those who hold to innocence theory would have us believe that unjust social arrangements, wrongful policies aremomentaryaberrations.Sothere’smomentary aberration theory, there’s incompetence theory, there’s unintended consequences theory, there’s innocent cultural proclivities theory. To be sure, such things exist: there are unintended consequences, there are cultural influences, all that. But do they explain the reasons for the major policy decisions of our political and economic leaders? Evidence and common sense suggest that the rich and powerful are not oblivious to their interests and do not leave things to chance.Paranoia. These things don’t really happen. We’ve imagined all this stuff about death squads in Central America. For years the U.S. financed, equipped, and trained a counterrevolutionary, murderous army of thugs and killers that conducted a two-front invasion against Nicaragua, murdering tens of thousands of Nicaraguans, destroying farm cooperatives, power stations, clinics, schools, homes, villages to bring ruin upon that nation’s economy. For years that happened. For years the president threatened them in every way, imposed boycotts and every other kind of aggression. Reagan even said he wanted the Sandinistas to “cry uncle.” Secretary of State Shultz promised to cast out the Sandinistas from our hemisphere.Yet, when the beleaguered Sandinista government charged that the U.S. wanted to overthrow them, ABC News dismissed the charge as “the Sandinista paranoia.” The Washington Post called it “Nicaraguan paranoia.” In a speech at the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the noted psychiatrist, diagnosed the Sandinistas as “paranoiac schizophrenics.”Verygood,JeaneKirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick’s comment came two weeks after Reagan and Shultz both announced that the U.S. might have to invade Nicaragua soon. So much for paranoia. I thought of what James Baldwin said years ago, that “even paranoiacs have real enemies.”Look, Parenti, aren’t we really asking people to believe too much by suggesting there are all these conspiracies? No, not as much as when asking them to believe there are not conspiracies. Historian Frank Kofsky puts it well in his book Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948. He says, “What would those who are so ready to derisively exclaim ‘Conspiracy theory!’ have us believe? That people with enormous fortunes and/or high political positions do not have greater opportunity than the ordinary citizen to get what they want? That men and women who spend most of their adult lives seeking to obtain or retain money and influence do so only in order to abstain from employing the advantages these confer? That those with wealth and power are inhibited by some mysterious force from making use of their wealth and power to accomplish their purposes? That the rich and well-placed refuse to cooperate with each other in the pursuit of common political, economic goals? If, in fact, there is one thing that characterizes those at the top, it is their readiness to 4 organize amongst themselves to secure their desires. No other group in society ever comes close in this regard.” I would add, it’s ironic that the group most organized to concert and control is to be the least considered as doing so by the innocence theorists.

As the capitalist state develops, it also increasingly develops its class consciousness and it brings forth coteries of policy makers, who move in law, business, military, and government circles, sometimes rotating one to the other. Those who are sometimes referred to as the power elite, the ruling elite, the plutocracy, more broadly I consider them the active agents of the ruling class. Their existence isamatter of public record. It’s been documented excellently by such fine scholars as Lawrence Shoup, William Domhoff, Holly Sklar. They’ve talked about the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Conference, and the other coteries of consciously organized power and policy making.These individuals all have a loyalty to a particular class ideology. You could not get into their ranks with a different ideology. If you can, give me an example. You don’t have to be rich to be brought into the ranks, although it helps. You just have to be useful. Kissinger, Nixon, Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, all come from relatively modest backgrounds, but they gained entree, they proved valuable and reliable. They all become rich after a while.Now, it’s understood that miners, steel workers, small farmers and schoolteachers might consciously direct efforts toward advancing their interests. But not these elites, at least according to the innocence theorists. Now, of course, coal miners and steel workers publicly push for their goals because they’re trying to enlist the support of broader publics. Corporate heads, plutocrats, network owners, policy elites tends to move more quietly, less visibly through the corridors of power, preferring not to stir up too much public attention.At other times, by the way, they will actually seek to mobilize public sentiment in a particular direction. For instance, in the mid-1970s we had a very interesting development. Business leaders showed an increasingly class-conscious concern for the drift of things in the mid-1970s. One corporate leader spoke to his concurring colleagues at a meeting of the Conference Board in 1974. I quote him: “The have-nots are gaining steadily more political power to distribute wealth downward. The masses have turned to a larger government.” This isn’t Lenin talking; this is a corporate elite. Another top executive concurred. He said, “If we don’t take action now, we will see our own demise. We will evolve into another social democracy.” You mean, like Sweden or Denmark or something like that. This was the research done by Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Silk a former economics/business writer for The New York Times. These corporate leaders have very conscious and explicit awareness of their class interests, speaking in explicit class terms here. Not to the public. They don’t say that when they come on the air. But when they talk to each other, it’s remarkable what they say.What they wanted was outlined, by the way, very explicitly. It’s no conspiracy. They concerted, they planned, but it was right out there in the public in major business publications from the mid-1970s onward. They wanted massive cutbacks in government spending in human services, they wanted an increase in military spending, they wanted generous tax write-offs and credits for upper-income individuals and corporations, and they wanted a rollback of government regulations on business. That’s what they wanted.Giant corporations like Citibank,IBM, Morgan Guaranty Trust, Exxon, Ford, and General Motors played an increasingly active and conscious role in financing conservative think tanks like the Hoover Institute, the AmericanEnterpriseInstitute,andseeingthata conservative business agenda penetrated the academic circles and mass media. You saw in the 1970s an array of conservative pundits and columnists moving into the media, and they still clutter up that media today. Corporate money financed the campaigns of ideologically conservativecandidatesthroughpoliticalaction committees, and the corporations devoted much more systematic effort to breaking labor unions.By 1978 some of the changes that corporate America wanted were already being instituted by the president himself, a Democrat named Jimmy Carter. He started cuts in human services, he started increasing military spending. Carter gave us Reaganism before Reagan.

But there were problems with Carter, because he was partially beholden to labor unions, to the African American vote. What corporate America wanted was an unencumbered ideological conservative, and their support went overwhelmingly to Ronald Reagan. They were lobbying for issue politics, but not just issue politics. They were trying to shift the center of political gravity of the entire policy arena in order to maintain class rule and avoid a social democracy that might cut too deeply into their privileges, wealth, and class power. They succeeded quite well.The innocence theorists will sometimes acknowledge that there is fault, that some people do some bad things. But when they do, they place responsibility on everyone, on an undifferentiated “we.”The innocence theorists can get quite specific about conscious intent and conspiracy if it comes from the left, if it involves militant dissenters, labor unions, leftist guerillas, peace demonstrators, or leaders of communist forces.Thenintent is readily ascribed.Then it’s recognized that people will actually be fighting for particular agendas for certain things. In fact, very sinister intent. The FBI, remember, looking at the nuclear-freeze movement that was sweeping America and charging that it 5 was KGB-directed. There was a bunch of conspiracy theorists right there, but the innocence theorists didn’t turn to them and say, “Ah, you kooky conspiracy theorists.” They said, “Could there be KGB agents or not?” They treated that as a serious proposition. It’s recognized that revolutionaries are capable of conspiracy. There are even laws against them, that revolutionaries are capable of concerted action directed toward consciously desired goals, but not counter revolutionaries, peace activists but not militarists and interventionists, proponents of change but not champions of the status quo, the poor but not the rich.Nothing said here, by the way, is meant to imply that ruling-class leaders are infallible or omnipotent. That’s the straw man that’s always put up in the literature and the debates we have. They say, “These people would say that there is this cabal, they make no mistakes, they’re infallible, they consciously know everything, they do everything.” Nobody is saying they’re infallible. Nobody says they’re limitless in their power. Despite the immense resources at their command, they’re sometimes limited in their options by circumstances beyond their control, by pressures from within the economic system. They have divisions among themselves about tactics, about what’s going to be more effective and what isn’t. They have pressures for the need to maintain legitimating democratic appearances, by their fear of angry and mass popular resistance sometimes. Sometimes.But whatever the limits of their power, these ruling elites are as fervently involved in class struggle as any communist. And if they don’t always succeed, they succeed often enough. They may not be omnipotent, but they’re enormously powerful. They’re far from infallible, but they have such a plentitude of resources as to do sufficient damage control and minimize their losses when mistakes are made, unlike us sometimes.Yet there are so many exposés that are written that never even deal with it. We read about environmental devastation. We read about the terrible effects of U.S. intervention in Panama or Nicaragua or Cuba or here or there. But why is U.S. policy doing this? Why are they doing these things? We read about costly military bases. There’s a very interesting book on that, The Sun Never Sets, how the U.S. has these bases all over the world. Why do they have these bases? Not mentioned. They talk about the costliness of it, the violation of the sovereignty of the countries involved, this, that, and the other thing. But why? Why do they find this necessary? What are the interests involved? We have even writing on the left where people don’t ask why.We learn not to ask why. Because once you ask you why, then you cross the line from a liberal complaint into a radical analysis. Then you are talking or have to talk about something. Or you have to start doing all those other ephemeral explanations. “Oh, Bush is doing this because he’s got a macho problem. That’s why he invaded Panama.” Or, “Oh, we’re doing this because we like to feel big.” Or, “We’re just kooky that way.” These become the explanations.Sometimes the mainstream investigators will look at why unjust things happen, and they’ll even ask it. And they will come up with innocuous answers or no answers. The media, by the way, specialize in that. Let me give you the example of the best in the mainstream media, Bill Moyers, the best of a terrible lot. In a televised show of his in April 1992, Moyers discussed the federal tax system. He pointed out the gross inequalities of the tax structure, how corporations evaded taxes by investing overseas, how U.S. investors in Puerto Rico and foreign investors in this country were exempt from paying taxes on most of their earnings, how the tax structure was riddled with tailor- made exemptions that favored particular firms and big campaign contributions. I was listening and I was saying, “Wow, this is terrific.” He was just laying these out, one after the other, with some footage.And then Moyers cuts back to his “panel of experts” and he asks, “Isn’t this just a case of good intentions gone awry?” And I said, “Whaa? Whaa?” And then he and the panelists proceeded to talk about the economy, they began to talk about the deficit, the need for more investment, as if all of the stuff he had just said hadn’t ever been said. It was kind of a remarkable thing to see how you can actually lay data right out in people’s faces. But it’s what Alvin Gouldner called “the tyranny of background assumptions.” They’re so great that you can ignore that stuff and then just go on with the other usual blather. Not one of themtalkedabouthowwealthyinterests consciously use their influence to extract special treatment under the law.It’s the same with U.S. foreign policy. We hear again and again, U.S. policy is so foolish, so stupid. Why did we go in there? It was so stupid. Why are we doing that? Just because you don’t understand what they’re doing doesn’t mean that they don’t understand what they’re doing. And neverisitasked,Whatistheintent?Without understanding intent, indeed U.S. policy remains an unsettling mystery, a puzzling thing to liberal critics. But such policy is really rational and quite successful. It consistently moves against any nation or social movement that tries to change the client state relations U.S. dominance and imperialism, that tries to use a greater portion of its natural resources, markets, and labor for self-development—moves that would infringe upon the interests of rich investors.If taken in the larger context, U.S. policy appears consistent and sensible and predictable and mostly successful. But most media analysts and academic analysts lack this larger context, and even most alternative media analysts. Once we realize these things about U.S. policy, we move, as I say, from a liberal complaint about how rational the policy is to a radical analysis about the rational interests involved and how a particular policy 6 coincides with similar U.S. policies all over the world for decades supporting privileged interests against popular movements.There are two models of conflict you can go with when conflicts arise. One model of conflict says that conflicts occur because of miscommunication. That’s what group facilitators and moderators specialize in: “There’s a lot of anger here. Let’s not get angry,” all that sort of thing. That people talk past one another, they misunderstand each other’s intentions, they anticipate the worst, they both start moving preemptively against each other and then they’re caught in a conflict that nobody wanted, and then the conflict escalates and it’s hard to tell who was acting and who was reacting. They’re carried along by their own self- fulfilling fears, and each side finds confirmation of aggressive intent in the other’s defensive or anticipatory moves. That model certainly explains a variety of conflicts. It’s a model that has validity, especially at the interpersonal level, I think.

Model two says that some conflicts, at least, occur not because of misunderstanding but because both sides understand each other all too well. They understand what the other is up to. That at least one side has a conscious agenda that it wishes to impose in order to advance its own interests at the expense of the other. So the conflict is not due to an irrational misunderstanding but to the pursuit of rational, substantive, and conflicting interests.

Labor-managementconflicts are not model one, they’re model two. The workers get up and they say, “We’re being ripped off.” You always get some of the commentators saying, “Labor and management should really learn to work together as a team. This is occurring because of emotions and hard feelings.” They got it wrong. It’s not the emotions and the hard feelings that are causing the conflict. It’s the conflict that is causing the emotions and hard feelings.Lundy Bancroft wrote a very interesting article. It takes exception to the notion that interpersonal and international conflicts are all variations of model one. Bancroft looks at two very interesting things: she looks at male violence against women and imperial violence against weaker nations.She points out in regard to male violence, supposedly men batter women because they don’t know what they’re doing. Tormented and in pain, they lose control of themselves and they lash out against those they love. That might happen on occasion. But what we’ve learned from having studied chronic batterers, men who chronically beat their female partners, is that they know precisely what they’re doing. They choose the amount of violence they use, they set limits for themselves that they don’t cross, they use violence in particular ways in order to get the kind of control they want. The police come in, and they sit down and pick up a newspaper and start reading and act innocent. “She fell. I don’t know what happened to her.” They know what they’re doing; they’re not out of control. The function of the violence, in fact, is to keep control.Andtherepersistsasimilarmythologyabout imperialism. Supposedly U.S. rulers don’t know what they’re doing abroad. In their misguided attempts to help out in other parts of the world, they stumble into doing a lot of damage. “Oh, they’re like bulls in a china shop.” Liberal opponents of the Vietnam War made this argument, “well-intentioned efforts, but we went awry again.” In the 1980s it was repeated about Nicaragua: “Our leaders don’t realize that Nicaragua isn’t a threat, that it wants peace. If only they understood that, they wouldn’t inflict such punishment upon the Sandinista governmentandtheNicaraguanpeople.”In fact, Nicaragua was a real threat to U.S. leaders, and the leaders knew it. “Any example of successful independent development not tied to the superpower batterers of the world is a tremendous danger to the ability of imperialists to continue to subjugate the rest of the world. True independence, like what Nicaragua was striving for, would set an example that would inspire others to attempt to gain control of their own lives and economic resources.” That’s what Bancroft says. She didn’t say anything different from what I’ve been saying about both batterers and imperialists. I think the originality, though, is the way she put those two together so nicely.Are decision makers really ill-willed and secretly conniving against us? Don’t they sincerely believe in the virtue of their cause? This question is always asked. Of course they do. All individuals, all interest groups, all parties, all ruling classes believe in their own virtue and are capable of adorning their actions with the highest motives. Sometimes they know they’re lying. Shultz says, “We were lying about Iran-Contra.” They know when they’re lying. But even with their lying, they feel it’s the best thing for all. So there is a certain sincerity even in their mendacity. Sometimes they genuinely believe the reasons they’ve cooked up to defend their actions.Sincerity is a natural product of the intensity of the interests felt. So it’s not a question of are they being hypocritical or are they sincere? They’re very sincere. The more that the class interest coincides with the arguments they give, the more sincerely those arguments are held and believed in. It’s hard to say at what exact psychological point the self-serving desires of the rich are transformed into genuinely held convictions about the rectitude of their cause.How do we determine the intent? Walter Karp said, “Divining intent is the essence of political analysis.” How do we decide that the reasons they give to justify their policies are true or false, regardless of whether they think them to be true?First, by the content of the issue itself, when they give six different reasons, when someone starts giving you three, four different reasons, then comes back and gives you a fifth reason they did something, you can be sure that 7 they’re piling it on. Because if they did something and they know why they did it and that’s what they believed, they would tell you that the first time. What they’re doing is grabbing for reasons. Every war we’ve gone into there have been these reasons grabbed at: rescue American students or civilians in the country, stop them from doing this with the Russians, because they were giving arms to so-and-so, or because they were going to kill all the priests or they were going to take all the this or that, whatever. So you can look at the consistency and inconsistency. You can look at the disparity between professed motives and actual behavior.Second, we can sometimes better judge intent by looking at the larger context, as I said before. This action relates to a whole host of other actions, a whole history of things that went on. When you look at the Gulf War and you look at a whole history of imperialism that went on there, it takes on a new meaning, a new idea. And you could ask yourself such questions as, If Kuwait produced broccoli, would we be doing this or not, as the peace movement did. You see a repeated pattern. Generally, the news-media reports are notoriously devoid of larger historical and political context.Third, sometimes the testimony of participants can reveal what’s on the minds of the participants. This is not always easy to come by, by the way. It’s not always easy to get direct testimony. First, because much of it is secret, much of it stays unrecorded. But, second, also because it is understood. When you look at Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, there were no instances of Nixon and Haldeman sitting there and saying, “We’ve got to work to overthrow communism and roll it back. Let’s plan and plot to do that.” That was understood as one of the goals.Consider the following. I want to give you an instance. From 1984 through 1987, U.S. leaders and their faithful media commentators repeatedly charged that Nicaragua refused to agree to the Contadora plan to end hostilities in Central America. You remember Óscar Arias’s Contadora plan. That was a lie. That was a blatant, out-and-out lie. Nicaragua, in fact, had everything to gain from the Contadora plan and peace in the area, and they repeatedly announced they were willing to sign. The U.S. at that time was prosecuting its war and embargo against Nicaragua withfullforce.U.S.officialsunilaterallyended negotiations with the Nicaraguans and then blamed them for obstructing progress, despite, or really because of, Nicaragua’s willingness to reach a peace accord.U.S. intentions were revealed—this is what I mean by directtestimony—inaNationalSecurityCouncil memorandum dated August 30, 1984, that was released under the Freedom of Information Act during the Iran- Contra hearings. “We have trumped Nicaragua. We have effectively blocked Contadora group efforts to impose a second draft on the revised Contadora Act.” So here they are boasting that they put a monkey wrench into Contadora while publicly saying it’s Nicaragua that has no interest, that’s trying to undermine Contadora. Another, weeks later, Admiral John Poindexter, memorandum, November 23, 1984, to National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane: “Continue active negotiations but agree on no treaty”—what does that mean? Continue to negotiate but absolutely no agreement—“and agree to work out some way to support the Contras”—that’s the mercenary army—“either directly or indirectly.”Then here’s a very interesting sentence, the most fascinating sentence I’ve seen in a government document in a long time. It said, “Withhold true objectives from staffs,” so that it’s not leaked by anybody, you see. “Withhold true objectives.” Give your staff the impression that you are working for an agreement under the Contadora plan but withhold true objectives. And when the Contadora group produced a new pact, which all of them agreed to sign—Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua—in May 1986, The New York Times reported that “Top U.S. officials convened a special meeting to deal with what one of them described as the ‘peace scare.’” So, you see, the truth comes out every so often.This isn’t a conspiracy fantasy; it’s a conspiracy actuality to conclude that U.S. leaders were not interested in reaching a peaceful accord, that they were lying about their real intentions to the American public, and even to their own staffs.Isn’t this just a demonization of ruling elites? You have a demon theory about them the way they have about you? No, it’s not a demon theory. They see me and people like me as a real mortal enemy to their class interests. They’re absolutely correct. It’s not a kooky theory. They’re right about me, I’m right about them. Are they really capable of supporting death squads, assassinations, torture, violent deeds like this? You’re talking about Yale, Princeton, Harvard graduates here. I remember speaking to a former CIA operative. Actually, he had been in the OSS and he had gone into the CIA in the early years under “Wild Bill” Donovan. He was in the administration at Yale University when I was back there for a postdoctoral. I remember him saying, “Well, Michael, it’s not a pretty world out there. We have to sometimes do things that aren’t very pretty, because we’re facing some very nasty individuals. So we’re compelled to do this. If the politics of the world were like politics in the U.S., we wouldn’t have to do it.” And they’re pretty dirty in the U.S., too. So they have it all rationalized.But the evidence does come out. Yes, they are capable of such things. Even Congress, the last to know. I always think of Congress as the deceived spouse. They’ve always the last to know. Do you remember, during the Iran- Contra hearings the Republican senators got up, Senator Cohen of Maine, Senator Rudman of New Hampshire. They got up and said, I thought we were intervening in Nicaragua because we were interdicting the arms that they were sending to El Salvador. Those guys really believed 8 that reason when Jeane Kirkpatrick and Shultz and Reagan gave that reason. I said, “Boy, they’re Boy Scouts.” If you read history, that stuff I was doing on the Spanish- American War, the same thing. The Senators who are getting up, they really believe the reasons that are given by the White House, at least they give every appearance of believing.There are people who are saying that we shouldn’t get hung up on conspiracies, we should be looking at the larger institutional forces. What I am arguing is that those larger institutional forces are directed by conscious human agency, and those agencies use conspiratorial or non- conspiratorial forces, and that the conspiratorial forces are important, they are not rare exceptions, and they are systemic in their nature and in their output.

What I would say to our friends is that we ought not to patronize the public. We should not dismiss these conspiracies as distractions from the bigger picture but see how they are an essential part of the bigger picture. It’s not an immature, kooky idea. It is the angry realization that state power is used in gangster ways by gentlemen gangsters who defend imperialism and the national security state.Concern about these issues is not gullibility but is an expression of concern about the nature of our government. The expression of public concern about the nature of our government, the angry criticism, there’s a name for that. And that is called democracy. And let’s have more of it. Thank you very much.

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